Picture of the land, before the weeds in California, and after,
with solid European foxtails in the after picture:

Dremann's Weed-Haikus are from a California perspective,
where all the plant understory in the lower elevations, below
3,000 feet (1,000 meters elevation), has been 99% replaced by
over 1,000 species of exotic plants, mostly introduced since 1769
from Europe, occupying tens of millions of acres that were originally
the home of 5,000 California native plant species.

The discovery at the 74 acre Shaw property in Santa Cruz County
in the June 2002 ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION cover article, of over
100 species of dormant native seeds in the California soils, still
alive underneath the exotic cover, could help change our perspectives
on weed management.

Dremann's Weed Haikus are proposing that perhaps we can TRANSCEND
EXOTICS, and have as the ultimate goal of our work, the ecological
restoration of the original California native understories.

The Dremanns are also suggesting that the native vegetation in
California is a keystone to the bringing of the annual winter
rainfall. Similar to the effects of a tiny sliver of native vegetation
that brings the only significant rainfall on the Arabian peninsula,
in the mountains above the town of Salalah in the Sultanate of
Oman.

Anything that diminishes the California native vegetation, like
5.5 million grazing cattle, or the 1.8 million milk cows, or the
600,000 sheep, stripping off the perennial native understory and
helping to spread the annual weeds, increases the desertification
of the State.

Annual weed management, and the preservation and restoration of
the California perennial native understory could become a critical
effort, to insure future annual rainfall, like the effects of
the native vegetation and rainfall association studied in Salalah,
Oman, on the Arabian peninsula and the cloud formation studies
over native vegetation in Australia.

If there is found to be a direct connection between the weed cover
and lack of the California native perennial understory, and the
quickly diminishing rainfall that the 38 million State residents
depend on--then weed management and restoration of the original
native understory may finally get some serious attention.

See "Pilot Study on Biosphere - Atmosphere
Interaction in Dhofar" [Oman] on the web by Prof.
Elfatih Eltahir at MIT http://web.mit.edu/eltahir/www/dhofar/content/
and

And Elagib, A. A. R. (2000) Can Science
and Technology Help to Initiate Natural Regreening of the Arabian
Peninsula? in Desertification in the Third Millennium,
Abdulrahman S. Alsharhan et al, editors in the Proceedings of
an International Conference, Dubai, 12-15 2000, pages 399-405.

Haiku No. 229
Ur one of first town,
goats eat shrubs--like two statues,
grass gone, that was end.

From http://www.ecoseeds.com/cool.html--There
is a statue...one copy in the University of Philadelphia and
the other in the British Museum: "Ram in the Thicket".
Made in Ur, Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) 4,700 years ago, it shows
a ram reaching high into a thicket to eat some leaves. This statue
may be one of the only examples of human-induced environmental
change incorporated into art.

This statue shows an environment, where all the ground-level
forage has been stripped off the land for many years, all
the palatable shrubs are gone, only leaving thorn bushes, with
even their lower branches have been stripped bare. Archeologists
are not sure what the ram statues signify, but they suspect it
was something religious. Perhaps it could have been an ancient
prophesy: "When the ram reaches high to eat the leaves of
the thorn bushes, your civilization will be destroyed"? The
rams did eat the thorn bush leaves, and Ur was destroyed.

Haiku No. 230
Take away native
plants and peoples from a land,
your plan may not stick.